When the Doors Opened Wide

The light at the end of the tunnel was not what you expected it to be. Instead of bright and warm and comforting, you felt it burn. It felt tight in your chest. You turned your face, your eyes, or you tried to, but you were not you any longer. You just were what you were, whatever that was.

No pulse. No breath. No skin.

You cried out and thought of so many things: sins, dreams, loves, lusts, wishes, desires, faces, names, places, sights, and screams. Their screams.

You did not want to be here. You wanted to be back there.

The house was falling in on itself. The wallpaper peeled. The moldy ceilings dripped when it rained and sometimes when it was just damp outside. Breezes chilled you there with the lack of insulation, with the cracks in the walls. It was no mansion, but it had been home. You had been free to be yourself there. You could be anyone, do anything. And you did.

You believed in nothing. You read your philosophy books. You once wanted to believe, but you decided you Kant. Not after what happened to you. Not after all that suffering. Not after what she did to you.

So, you made do. You did what you felt needed to be done. You did it to person after person.

You never wanted to suffer alone. So the world suffered with you. The world feared you, and this excited you.

Bodies upon bodies and news clippings in a soiled scrapbook.

You took Polaroids, too. You wanted to capture every single agonized face, every engorged strangled visage.

But no one saw your face when it was your turn. No one called your name. No one ever knew it was you, so it was all wasted.

There won’t even be a Wikipedia article on you.

The light at the end of the tunnel turned off and you fell back into your skin.

The light was just a fridge light. The tunnel had just been your vision fading out as the oxygen left your brain. But you came back. Just long enough to see yourself one last time.

The pain in your chest tightened. You clutched your shirt.

Milk spilled all around you, and you drooled. You wet yourself.

You looked up to the rotting ceiling, at the black spreading mold. In that mold you saw yourself staring back at yourself and you laughed. Or you tried to.

There was no breath left in your lungs.

Then the mold opened. It became a door. You felt yourself lifted up by cold hands. You looked around you, and there were many doors. Inside the doors there was only darkness and screams. You recognized their voices.

They were happy to see you again.

You wished you could say the same.

You look backwards but there is nowhere to go.

They call your name.

You scream.

Shoegazing/Negative Space

I spent my days searching for the hidden spaces between colors, the silent tones hidden in melodies, and listening for the unsaid words in every conversation. Negative space, they call it. It is there. The meaning, that is.

I found you there. Your hair was a dark brown braid, your voice was a wind chime of laughter, and I heard you say “Here.”

I looked again and it was just a rusty railroad track, unused and covered by kudzu vines, sapling pines, and locusts. I could smell honeysuckle in the air, and it almost smelled like a woman, or a girl, it almost smelled like you, but you were not there.

Did you hear me call your name?

I fell backwards in space. Time is just another dimension of space.

We fell together and separated into two. We were once joined together, one, in love.

In pieces.

And there should have been another conversation here somewhere. Another word, or string of words, or maybe even a simple goodbye would have sufficed? But no, I would have still looked.

“Stop staring at your shoes!”

But I’m not staring at my shoes. I’m looking through them.

To something that looks a little like you and a lot like me…